So today I installed Debian 9 on my laptop. I tried to play Stardew Valley (a game) which is a fairly minimal game with low end requirements. The game started and I played it for like 15 - 20 min and then I noticed that my laptop had really heated up. I quickly quit the game when I noticed the game lagging. My Xfce system was for the most part fine but Firefox ESR really slowed down like the scrolling stopped being smooth ,closing tabs was slow with slow animations, etc. I thought it was particular to this game only but I noticed the same symptoms on all games I tried including the Windows ones (on wine). I even noticed the performance being worse in a lot of games than in Windows and Windows didn't really heat up my laptop a lot, since I don't really play any high end games. I've also noticed that a lot of these games take up 100% of the CPU in 'top' .

So are the drivers for iGPUs just worse in linux or is there some other problem here. I thank you for any help.

So are the drivers for iGPUs just worse in linux or is there some other problem here. I thank you for any help.

Wow, that sounds like a pretty successful first taste. It's not going to set itself up for you, it takes some patience. I think it's great that you even figured out how to get the game to run on your first try.

So today I installed Debian 9 on my laptop. I tried to play Stardew Valley (a game) which is a fairly minimal game with low end requirements. The game started and I played it for like 15 - 20 min and then I noticed that my laptop had really heated up. I quickly quit the game when I noticed the game lagging. My Xfce system was for the most part fine but Firefox ESR really slowed down like the scrolling stopped being smooth ,closing tabs was slow with slow animations, etc. I thought it was particular to this game only but I noticed the same symptoms on all games I tried including the Windows ones (on wine). I even noticed the performance being worse in a lot of games than in Windows and Windows didn't really heat up my laptop a lot, since I don't really play any high end games. I've also noticed that a lot of these games take up 100% of the CPU in 'top' .

So are the drivers for iGPUs just worse in linux or is there some other problem here. I thank you for any help.

Thanks for posting CPU and GPU data. So, you're not using a gaming machine. Although Windows games will play faster on Windows and not heat up the computer as much, because they are written for Windows, not Linux. Playing games on Wine slows down the performance of the games because you are running Wine and the game. Games written for Linux play well on Linux and if they could run on Windows would be slower. As most people buy computers with Windows installed, and less people install Linux, most games are written for Windows. Firefox uses resources but can be configured to be faster, depending on how many tabs you open at the same time.Drivers for Intel GPUs are generally quite good in Linux. I think that you will find Debian much more stable, easier to update, doesn't require rebooting any where near as much, and generally gives better overall performance.

Also I've noticed one more thing , that the CPU usage remains at around 30% when game is not interacted with but rises up to 80 - 100 % when even the mouse is moved or a button is clicked on. I also noticed this on rpg maker vx ace games where when window is minimized the cpu usage goes down to 10 % (though this may be because it's not being rendered anymore). When the window is opened the cpu usage goes to 20 - 30 % and when a key is pressed cpu usage goes to 60 - 90 %.

Probably some combination of better heatsink/fan and underclocking, cpufreq limiting, or disabling the turbo boost stuff is going to be what you want. One thread I saw said the older ones throttled down when the temp hit 97F which isn't very high at all.

How hot do you think it is getting, the sensors output on inxi says 52C, about 125F?

If xfce4 doesn't have temp monitor, I use a little pkg called wmgtemp, it's made for a dock, but I use it even on kde because it's small and simple.

I actually almost bought one of these on craigs, glad now that I didn't. The heat/throttlegate thing didn't pop up on a regular search for the model. Good to know.